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Staff Reviews

It's the book everyone seems to be talking about, and for good reason. McBride's novel stretches the boundaries of language: every word feels deliberate, and once you get the hang of her voice, it's impossible to tear yourself away. Seemingly innocuous sentences hit me right in my gut. There were no unnecessary adjectives to hide feelings behind. Words are ripped and gnashed apart, then stitched back together, falling in and out of coherence as the narrator does the same. I cried on Muni while reading it. It's that kind of book. I think about it constantly.

— Amy

"Just as some today refer to her as the 'female James Joyce' (blech), I 100% believe that one day, any author who tries to push the boundaries of the English language will have to quake in the shadow of Eimear McBride." - Vivian

Description

The dazzling, fearless debut novel that won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the book the New York Times hails as "a future classic."

In scathing, furious, unforgettable prose, Eimear McBride tells the story of a young girl's devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt, and unrelenting trauma, McBride's writing carries echoes of Joyce, O'Brien, and Woolf. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a revelatory work of fiction, a novel that instantly takes its place in the canon.

About the Author

Award-winning author Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent just under a decade trying to have it published. The novel went on to win the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliot Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, among others. She currently lives in Norwich with her family. Her second novel is The Lesser Bohemians.